


The Right Man for the Job

by HiNerdsItsCat (HiLarpItsCat)



Series: Uncertain Point of View [5]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends: X-wing Series - All Media Types, Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Corran Horn POV, Dark Side Corran Horn, Family Feels, Happy Ending, Inquisitor Corran Horn, Memory Alteration, POV Second Person, The Dark Side of the Force, Well It's A Happy Ending For Someone
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 01:54:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,883
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16108346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HiLarpItsCat/pseuds/HiNerdsItsCat
Summary: Your name is Corran Horn. You wanted to be a detective but the Inquisitorius found you first.You have spent the last few years as Darth Vader’s covert agent.He has assigned you a new mission: infiltrate the Rebellion and discover the identity of the pilot who destroyed the Death Star.





	The Right Man for the Job

Your name is Corran Horn.

You are in your first week at the Corellian Security Force Academy. You passed your entrance exam with flying colors, your grandfather implies, though he can't tell you outright since that would be an abuse of his power as CorSec Director. He and your parents are so proud of you that you're nearly walking on air, even though you knew that you would almost certainly get in because being a CorSec officer is practically in your blood. It's all you've ever wanted to be for as long as you can remember.

Your first week at the Academy is cut short when the dean of student affairs calls you into his office and tells you that you will be leaving the Academy, effective immediately. He says that there was an issue with the results of the entrance exam’s practical section—namely, that you surpassed the previous record high score (your father’s score, in fact) by a margin of twenty points. Your score wasn’t just exceptional, it was nearly perfect. He shows you the holo of your examination and you watch yourself react to threats that you couldn't possibly have known about in advance, make deductive leaps that seem to come out of nowhere, and it hits you that he's accusing you of cheating. You demand to take the test again, or be put on academic probation until you can prove that you belong here, because you  _ do _ belong here.

He says that it's out of his hands; your performance caught the notice of people far more powerful than him and that they were the ones to make the decision. You're practically trembling with anger over how unfair this all is. Your family always pushed you to be exceptional and now you're being kicked out for being  _ too _ exceptional.

You notice someone entering the dean’s office before the dean himself notices, even though your back is to the door. You turn to find the white and red face of a Pau’an, though you've never seen one with yellow eyes before.

The dean explains that you are not being expelled, merely transferred.

To the Inquisitorius.

* * *

Your name is Corran Horn and there has obviously been a huge misunderstanding.

You're not Force-sensitive. You can't be Force-sensitive because you remember that they did a blood test when you were a child and your midichlorian count was completely average. Sure, you get hunches sometimes that turn out to be correct, but that's just because you're smart and occasionally lucky.

The Inquisitor—who you later find out is the Grand Inquisitor himself, which kind of feels like overkill to you—gives you another blood test. He says that somebody must have altered your original results, because while you aren't a prodigy, you're definitely Force-sensitive and that means that you belong to the Inquisitorius now.

You aren't given a chance to pack your things or say goodbye to anyone. The dean’s memory is wiped and it will look as though you just disappeared. 

You tell the Inquisitor that you're from a family of detectives and that you're sure they won't rest until they find out what happened to you. He tells you that they wouldn't dare. 

On your way to the shuttle bay, you look for ways to alert someone to what's going on, that you're being taken against your will, but the Inquisitor stops you before you even try. 

As if out of nowhere, he tells you that strength in the Force often runs in families. The implication is clear: if you fight him on this then your whole family will be under suspicion. Before today, you would have said that it didn't matter because your family had nothing to hide, but now it's dawning on you that your blood test results must have been falsified by someone with high-level access to private records and that the most obvious candidate is the director of CorSec himself. You're not even trained in law enforcement yet and you already know that your grandfather had the means, motive, and opportunity to do whatever he felt he had to do in order to keep his family from being taken away by the Empire.

You were brought up with a strong sense of duty and adherence to the law, but you can't possibly turn your grandfather in, so you grit your teeth and go to Coruscant.

* * *

Your name is Corran Horn and you wish that they would just send you back to Corellia. 

At least there you were good at something. Here, among the other Inquisitors-in-training, you're woefully inadequate. 

Your competitiveness motivates you and provides you with enough anger to wield the Dark Side but you can't do telekinesis at all no matter how hard you try, which also means that any of the agility tricks that could be used to augment your combat skills are out of your reach. In some cases, literally out of your reach.

You’re not too bad with a lightsaber, though if you’re being honest you’d prefer to just use a blaster. 

By the time Darth Vader arrives to check on the progress of the new trainees, you’ve heard enough about him to make you extremely nervous. You might be able to tap into the Dark Side of the Force but he’s the real deal: a Dark Lord of the Sith with abilities that are beyond impossible. The galaxy’s walking nightmare, the Emperor’s attack wolf, the killer of hundreds of Jedi. Since you’re training to hunt down whatever Jedi are left, you suppose you should be grateful to him for making your job that much easier. 

No one seems curious about who he was before he appeared seemingly out of thin air at the Emperor’s right hand. Someone that powerful in the Force couldn’t just fly under the radar for so long, you think, but then you remember that the Emperor did exactly that. 

You hear rumors: that Darth Vader has had so many cybernetic replacements that he’s more machine than man, that he routinely murders subordinates who fail him, and, most relevant to you at the moment, that he has been known to dismember novice Inquisitors to teach them the lesson of loss. 

You’d prefer to keep that lesson purely theoretical. 

Unfortunately, you get his attention almost immediately because it’s obvious that you’re not able to keep up with the others. Vader says something snide and, momentarily forgetting that it will probably get you killed, you snap back at him that maybe you aren’t doing well because you have terrible teachers. 

He ignites his lightsaber and comes at you. You hold up your hand to ward off the blade (which is, a distant part of your mind points out, a really stupid reflex), but instead of taking off your hand it just stops, pressing against your palm. The pain is incredible and you’re terrified for your life, but you’re also so blindingly furious at how unfair this all is and how you never asked to come here anyway, that you don’t even think about what you do next. 

A dark instinct takes over and you find yourself drawing in a wave of pure energy, dragging it into you through the agony in your hand. Every inch of you feels like you’re on fire but you’ve also never felt so powerful in your entire life. 

Darth Vader’s lightsaber flickers and then dies. 

All that power inside of you has to go somewhere, and you barely know what you’re doing until Vader slams into the far wall hard enough to dent the metal. You used telekinesis for the first time in your life and you used it to attack the most dangerous person in the galaxy.

He could strangle you with the Force, or take a lightsaber from another Inquisitor and try to cut you down again, or just order the rest of them to kill you. Instead, he just stands up and stares at you. 

You just attacked Darth Vader and probably embarrassed him in front of everyone, but somehow you’re still alive. 

* * *

Your name is Corran Horn and you just got a new job.

Vader decides that you could be of better use to the Empire as a covert agent. He takes you with him when he leaves and says that he will teach you himself. 

Your Force training with Vader is surprisingly rewarding, to the point that you have to grudgingly admit that he’s a pretty good teacher. You learn that you have some skills in the Force that make you a very unique asset. You can absorb energy and use it to power your other abilities. Vader shows you how to block blaster bolts with your bare hands but advises that you refrain from grabbing lightsaber blades in the future. It takes a lot of surgery before your hand is back to 100%. 

Even better, though, is the other power that you discover with Vader’s guidance: you have a preternatural ability to dominate the minds of others through the Force. You can plant thoughts in people’s heads, alter or erase their memories, and in the case of particularly weak-minded individuals, control them like puppets. 

Since the combat training given to the Inquisitors isn’t a good fit, you’re sent to train with your counterpart who is a covert agent for the Emperor: a redhead around your age who is somehow even more sarcastic than you are. You like her from the moment you meet her. She wins almost every sparring match you have with her, but you sometimes use the Force to trick her into thinking that you won instead (though you stop doing that after she breaks your arm in retaliation). 

You learn how to infiltrate organizations, how to gather information, how to manipulate and assassinate those who defy the Empire. Sometimes they feel like the sorts of things that you would have learned at the Corellian Security Force Academy, just more lethal. Unlike your time with the Inquisitors, you’re actually good at this. Extremely good, in fact. 

You’re probably only two or three snarky comments away from being strangled but you get the strange feeling that Vader might actually like you. You pick up from context clues that he was probably a young adult during the Clone Wars, which would make him around your father’s age. It’s difficult to imagine Vader being anything other than what he is but sometimes you sense a weird wistfulness through the Force when he looks at you. You wonder if he had a son somewhere who would have been your age.

You’re falling into the same kind of psychological trap yourself. You still push yourself to your limits but it’s no longer because you’re scared that he’ll kill you if you fail. You want him to be proud of you the way that you wanted your father and grandfather to be proud of you. 

Some days, after you’ve done something particularly well, you can tell that he is.

* * *

Your name is Corran Horn and you’re glad that this whole Death Star thing wasn’t your responsibility. 

Vader managed to escape the station’s destruction and you feel relieved. You realize that you actually missed him and would have been upset if he had died, even if your long-term odds of making it to old age would have gone up dramatically. 

At the time, you were assigned to clean up the mess that Tarkin left behind on Jedha. Not that there was much to clean up on the planet itself, but the annihilation of a culturally important city by a single destructive beam is still a little difficult to keep hidden, and Vader was adamant that the station’s existence be kept a secret until it was fully operational. All the same, it was a fairly typical cover-up mission for you: track down the people who know things that they shouldn’t and either remove the information from their heads or remove their heads from the rest of them.

When you rendezvous with Vader on Mustafar, he tells you that he has a new assignment for you. The Death Star had a fatal weakness, one that was discovered by the Rebels, but it involved a nearly impossible feat of flying in order to exploit it. Vader tried and failed to shoot down the pilot who made the one-in-a-million shot, but in the process sensed that the Force was strong with him. Vader orders you to infiltrate the Rebellion and discover the identity of that pilot. 

* * *

Your name is Corran Horn and it’s actually strange to go by your own name for once.

The easiest covert identity you can assume is your own, so you go back home to Corellia. You tell your parents and your grandfather that you had transferred to Carida for stormtrooper training and that you couldn’t bring yourself to tell them at the time because you were so scared that they would be ashamed of you for choosing something other than CorSec. They obviously aren’t thrilled with you but at least they seem to accept your explanation. Your father occasionally gives you some strange looks, though, and while you wonder if he’s getting some nudge from the Force, you know that you’re safe. You were trained for this and he was not. 

Your research and your hunches prove to be correct: your family has ties to the Rebellion and can help you get in contact with them. In an odd way, this makes you sad because you know that one of these days they’re going to get caught by someone other than you. You might even be the one sent to deal with them and you know that when that day comes you’ll follow orders because they’re Rebels and traitors and criminals. 

When you arrive on Thila, you tell the Rebels that you’re a former TIE pilot who defected. They believe you instantly and you almost roll your eyes because it’s amazing they’ve lasted this long with that level of blind acceptance. You really just want to call Imperial Intelligence and send them over here, but that isn’t your mission. You resolve to suggest it to Vader when you next check in, though. A few Inquisitors and a squadron or two of stormtroopers could probably end the whole Rebellion once and for all. 

They give you a flight test, assign you to Rogue Squadron, and you roll your eyes all over again because it’s obvious that the squadron commander is an idiot. Well, not an idiot exactly, just extremely naive. Skywalker’s never commanded anything before and it shows, but everyone seems content to follow him anyway because he’s such a damn ray of sunshine that it’s hard not to like him. 

To your great annoyance, you find yourself liking him as well. 

It doesn’t take long before you figure out that Skywalker was the one who destroyed the Death Star. The whole thing was so easy that you wonder why Vader even bothered to send you. At least you’re still embedded in the Rebellion and bringing it down from the inside might be an interesting challenge, though you’re not holding your breath. 

When you finally get in contact with Vader, you pass along the information and even though you’re on the other side of the galaxy, you feel his surprise through the Force like a slap to the face. This name means something to him. You resolve to find out why. 

He tells you to bring Skywalker to him as soon as possible. Privately, you think this is a lot of effort for nothing but it’s not your job to question his orders. If Vader wants Skywalker alive, then you’ll bring him in alive. 

The challenge is in getting Skywalker into a position where you can knock him out and steal a ship before anyone realizes what happened, but getting Skywalker alone is more difficult than you thought. He usually spends what little free time he has between missions in the company of that Princess and the irritating Corellian who keeps following her around. For a moment, you wish you had been able to join CorSec after all, because nothing would bring you more joy than the opportunity to send that lowlife smuggler off to Kessel.

You try to nudge Skywalker with the Force into joining you somewhere, but the most it gets you is the occasional confused look around the room before returning to whatever it was he was doing. You’ll have to rely on your charm instead.

* * *

Your name is Corran Horn and things just got a lot more complicated. 

This is mostly because you accidentally befriended Luke Skywalker and now you have to ruin his life. 

This is also because you were just a little too curious about Vader’s past and now you know something that you probably shouldn’t know. 

You don’t really qualify as an Inquisitor anymore, but the fact is that you know pretty much everything that the Empire knows about the Jedi that survived Order 66. In particular, you know about Obi-Wan Kenobi, who not only survived but was rumored to be the Jedi who gave Vader the wounds that put him in that suit. 

Thanks to Luke, you now know that Kenobi had been hiding out on Tatooine and was subsequently killed by Vader himself on the Death Star. According to Luke, Vader used to be Kenobi’s pupil. 

But you know that Kenobi only had one apprentice: Anakin Skywalker. 

You nearly groan out loud when Luke says that Kenobi told him that Darth Vader murdered Anakin Skywalker, because it’s such an obvious lie. Darth Vader had to have been  _ someone _ before the Jedi Purge began, so why couldn't he have been a former Jedi who switched his allegiance to the right side?

Vader  _ does _ have a son around your age. He just didn’t know it until you told him. 

You’re hit with an unexpected wave of jealousy, which you try to shove out of your mind because you know you’re being ridiculous. You’re Vader’s pupil and agent and tool, you're not his son, and even if he does end up replacing you with Luke it shouldn’t matter because you shouldn’t care unless it results in your death. 

Enough. Time to get this over with. 

You shoot Luke with a stun bolt and drag him onto the nearest ship, which turns out to be the scrap heap that the Corellian smuggler owns. Well,  _ owned  _ might be the more accurate term for it now.

* * *

Your name is Corran Horn and you have an absolutely terrible idea but one that might make everything better in the long run. 

While you have him tied up on the  _ Falcon _ , you decide to tell Luke that Vader is his father. He takes it about as well as you expect, which is to say not well at all. Still, you think, it’s better that he know now than find out when he’s face to face with Vader, who will definitely not be pleased with the idea of his son despising him and everything he represents. 

If only Kenobi hadn't gotten to Luke first, you think, which is when you get your terrible idea. 

If Luke didn't know anything about the Jedi, if Kenobi hadn't lied to him about his father and everything else, if Luke hadn't watched Vader cut Kenobi down on the Death Star… Vader might have been able to win him over. It still might not have worked because of the Princess and Alderaan, but maybe there was something you could do about that. 

It's only about a month or two of events to cover up, you reason, so you're pretty sure you can pull it off. Luke is strong in the Force but he hasn't been trained like you have. You once convinced Mara Jade that you managed to land a punch while sparring with her. This farmboy never stood a chance.

Erasing every memory of Kenobi is difficult but not impossible. You let Luke remember buying the droids and how one of them ran off into the wastes. You remove the memory of Kenobi finding him and replace it with the disoriented haze of a concussion caused by a gaffi stick. 

In Luke's new recollection of events, he stumbles back to his landspeeder without finding either droid. He returns home to find that sandpeople raided his farm and killed his aunt and uncle, leaving him with no reason to stay on Tatooine. 

It's easy for you to blur the Corellian’s features into matching your own, to change his arrogant bragging into your voice telling Luke that you're looking for a new co-pilot.

It's hard to alter the memory of every single thing that happened next, so instead you blot it out. No Death Star, no Princess, no Rebellion. In their place, you spin out the fantasy that every kid on a backwater world has when they look up at the stars: a life of freedom, of excitement, of adventure, of traveling the galaxy with his best friend at his side.

It isn't perfect; obviously you can't fill in every gap or clear up every point of confusion, and it's still possible that Luke might one day recover his original memories, but at least this way Vader gets a chance to explain things the way they're supposed to be.

While Luke sleeps off what was a fairly ambitious mental overhaul, you send a message to Vader, letting him know what to expect. 

Judging from his reaction when he replies, you know that you don't have to worry about being replaced. 

You wake Luke up after landing on Mustafar. He's disoriented but you can tell that your work paid off. You remind him about the invitation you received, the new job waiting for you both, the next chapter in your tale of adventure.

You lower the ramp on the ship and go introduce your friend to the rest of his life.

* * *

Your name is Corran Horn. You used to want to be a detective so that your family would be proud of you.

Now you have a different job and a different family and your life is so much better than you ever thought it would be.

Luke eventually found out what you did and you still have the scars to show for it, but by that point it barely mattered anymore because you had been through so much else together. His reconciliation with his father took longer, but in the end he understood why things had to happen the way that they did. 

The Rebellion persists in spite of having every reason to collapse. You know that Luke feels conflicted about it, but the more he learns about the Dark Side the more he seems to come to terms with what has to be done to bring order to the galaxy.

You thought you would be jealous of him becoming Vader’s Sith apprentice, but for some reason you never are. Maybe it's destiny like Vader says, or maybe it's that you have your strengths and Luke has his, and you both know that you have nothing to fear from the other. Sometimes Vader sends you out on missions together and it's like those false memories suddenly become real: you and the man you consider your brother, side by side, taking on the galaxy together.

**Author's Note:**

> Of all the stories in this series so far, this is the one that I most want to eventually expand into a longer work.
> 
> Dialogue that I wanted to include in here but never found a way to work in:  
> Vader: "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force."  
> Corran: "Yeah, but I bet that it _helps._ "
> 
>  
> 
> Music: Nathan Trent, "Running On Air"


End file.
